Description

This project aims to upgrade a licensed toy replica of the tricorder from the original "Star Trek" series into a functional and undeniably stylish tool.

Details

A few years ago, Diamond Select Toys/Art Asylum produced a line of licensed toy Star Trek (the original series) tricorders. They're generally regarded by fans as serviceable toy replicas of the original props.

The simulated screen and stock lights and sounds just don't do it for me, though. I realized that if I strip out the toy's guts, I'd be left with an enclosure which would fit a Raspberry Pi and associated hardware to make a tricorder which actually displays my own animations and plays my choice of sounds. It could be made into really fun toy, not just a display piece which gathers dust on a shelf.

From there it was a short leap to realizing that, taking inspiration from the many functional tricorder-inspired projects here on Hackaday.io and elsewhere, I could also add actual working sensors. I could try to defictionalize this tricorder. I could make the best kind of prop replica: one that actually does in reality what it did in fiction.

I'm a hardware person, not a coder (or a doctor, dammit!) but in order to make this work I'm going to have to build those skills up a bit. I'd been wanting to do so anyway, and this is as good an excuse as any!

Project Logs

Not much of an update, I'm afraid; I'm moving out of my apartment, so the goodies are packed away until I find a new place. Wish me luck! (And hey, if you know anyone renting out a room in New York City...)

The one bit of additional info I do have to report comes from before I had to pack up my workbench: upon running this for any extended length of time, the screen gets hotter and hotter until it goes out. I'll have to address this somehow; either finding a way to run the screen on less power, and/or heat-sinking it somehow.

I look forward to being able to work on this again; rest assured, this is not abandoned. I will pick it up again ASAP, I will finish it, and it will be awesome.

Now that we've disassembled the toy tricorder, and my Adafruit order has arrived, we're going to have to do some modding to what's left of the tricorder to fit the hardware we want to cram into it.

Let's take a closer look at said hardware.

Raspberry Pi Model B+ - I chose the B+ over the more powerful Pi 2. I don't think I'm going to be pushing this gadget to do multi-core-level work, but we still get the extra GPIO pins and improved power-efficiency. While my primary goal is just to get a Pi running in the tricorder shell, I think if we do end up adding sensors to this, we'll need all the pins and battery power we can get.

2.5" diagonal TFT television - The find that put me over the edge toward finally starting this project, after having it in the back of my mind for a long time, was this screen which happens to be just about the same size as the simulated screen in the toy. I knew it'd be a distinct possibility of fitting this perfectly in place of the toy's screen. Plus, though this is specced at a 6V minimum, it seems to do just fine connected to the Pi's 5V pin.

Misc - I have a cellphone recharger I'll be using as a battery, and a wireless handheld keyboard/mouse combo.

Here's the hardware connected up and running. The USB dongle you see is the receiver for the keyboard.